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Not For Long. The phrase has grown into a mantra for the NFL, a reminder of how quickly a career can end.
That was not exactly the intention of Houston Oilers coach Jerry Glanville, who once coined the phrase while yelling at an official: “This is N-F-L, which stands for ‘not for long’ when you make them f—ing calls.”
Still, it seems to suit playing careers accurately. But how accurately?
Inside: At what age do NFL players peak? Plus every team’s most intriguing newcomer heading into training camp. Let’s go.
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Average NFL career length?
Commentators usually describe the average length of an NFL career as being about 3 1/2 years, often citing this 2002 story in The New York Times.
That article was based on 1987-1996 data from the NFLPA. It raised questions of exactly which players counted as having been on rosters — along with how much the numbers might have changed since then.
Some partial answers might have arrived via a Roger Goodell conference call in 2011, when the commissioner said:
“Frequently, it is said that the average career is about 3 1/2 years. In fact, if a player makes an opening-day roster, his career is very close to six years. If you are a first-round draft choice, the average career is close to nine years. That 3 1/2-year average … adds a lot of players who don’t make an NFL roster, and it brings down the average.”
It’s fair to say that there’s no definitive answer on the “average” NFL career.
So I dug a bit deeper. This chart shows the number of games played by each age group from 2000 through 2025, sorted by offensive position. This illustrates the ages when players actually saw the field most:
It’s certainly a young man’s game, with the majority of impact coming between ages 23 and 27.
The culprit? Speed and sustainability plays a role — these are massive humans colliding at full speed, after all — but what neither Goodell’s 2011 comment nor the NFLPA’s 1990s study could account for were the effects of the rookie wage scale.
Introduced in a 2011 agreement between the union and league, the scale forces all draftees (typically between ages 21 and 23) into non-negotiable, four-year contracts usually below market value. It’s a big reason why the careers of so many of those charted players peaked around ages 24 and 25. Those ages include nearly all rookie-contract players, many of them at the midpoint of being affordable and having NFL playing experience.
When are NFL players at their best, though? Let’s examine that now.
Finding NFL primes
The idea of players “peaking” — being at the best of their abilities — is common across sports. Players know it. Coaches seek it. Fans understand it. But quantifying it? A definitive statistical measurement is tough to even imagine.
Thankfully, the good folks at Pro Football Reference have a useful tool that can get us close: Approximate Value, or AV. It measures each NFL player’s contributions to his team, calculated based a mix of team success and individual stats, balanced across positions.
AV is complicated, but one easy way to confirm its validity is to check its all-time leaderboard. These are the highest-AV seasons of all time at each position:
Quibble here and there? Overall, that’s about as valid as a list gets.
Now that we can trust AV to judge a player’s season, let’s look at how it assesses seasons in bulk by age.
Assembling the data for this next graphic took me an entire week. It maps all player ages between 20 and 40, broken down by offensive position over the past 25 seasons. The darker the shade, the better the average performance among players of that age:
Whoa. Running backs peaking across a 10-year span? Tackles and centers peaking at 37? That can’t be right. Yet it is. In a way.
Think about it: Mediocre players get phased out of the game after their rookie contracts, so these numbers get skewed by long-term greats like Travis Kelce and Trent Williams.
Stars who perform into their late 30s are among the few players remaining in their age brackets, so they’re overrepresented in these numbers.
But that actually suggests something important: We should worry less about players aging. Players who last beyond a four-year rookie contract don’t drop off as quickly as everyone in your fantasy football league might think, and some even continue to improve.
Versions of that hold true for every offensive position:
- Quarterbacks often peak between 29 and 33, which suggests we’ve yet to see the best of Justin Herbert (28), Jalen Hurts (27) and Jordan Love (27).
- Running backs peak early (and despite the perception, stars can remain stars into their 30s), while receivers need more time to master routes and chemistry before entering their primes around age 26.
- Tight ends, who rely less on top-end speed, can keep improving into their 30s. Tackles might enjoy the longest primes of all, perhaps a full decade from their late 20s onward, a bit lengthier overall than guards and centers.
So while “Not For Long” might apply to the average career, don’t mistake it as applying to stars. History suggests they’ll age more gracefully than we expect. Especially at this next position:
The longevity of defensive tackles
Does the durability of star players hold true on defense?
Last year, 34 defenders met these criteria: Veterans of 10-plus seasons, they played at least 400 snaps in 2025, with PFF grades of at least 60. Half were big men up front.
- Defensive tackle: 17
- Edge rusher: 8
- Linebacker: 4
- Safety: 6
- Cornerback: 0
Whenever a team adds a solid lineman on either side of the ball, everyone remarks, “They just added a 10-year starter.” Turns out it’s often true.
On defense, the inside of the line is just a different beast. Paul Dehner Jr. explored how DTs are aging better than ever, speaking with the Bengals’ 28-year-old addition Dexter Lawrence, who’s now alongside the 31-year-old Jonathan Allen. They explained why their cohort has been aging so well:
💬 “You don’t lose strength,” Allen said. “That’s the last thing to go. That’s something I’m still able to rely on. And if anything, I feel stronger than ever.”
“It’s (also) an understanding of how offenses work, an anticipation of what they are going to do can help you so much more than a cornerback, where if you don’t have the speed to keep up with a go ball, it’s going to be hard at 35 to keep up with receivers just coming into the league.”
Paul’s full story offers a great look into how aging works at a cornerstone position.
Extra Points
😬 A chaotic weekend. Former Lions first-round pick Terrion Arnold, a favorite of Nick Saban at Alabama, was arrested, released on $1 million bond and cut by Detroit. The story of the weekend that caused all this.
👰🤵 Kelce-Swift. In a first for this newsletter, we’ve got a matrimony story: why Madison Square Garden was the right venue for Kelce’s wedding to Taylor Swift. It has everything to do with security.
🏈 Giant takeaways. Dan Duggan shared one thought each on Jaxson Dart, Cam Skattebo and every other player on New York’s offense before training camp.
💭 One thought on … similar stories for Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers offense, as well as Matthew Stafford’s Rams offense.
▶️ Thursday’s most-clicked: One lingering question each for all 32 teams.
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